Review of the Week: Tao of Glass at Soho Place

Soho Place, London W1, until 12 September

Phelim McDermott’s singular sort-of-one-man show is haunted by two absences. The first is Billy’s Wonderful Kettle, an Aladdin knock-off that the seven-year-old McDermott missed because he made himself literally sick with excitement, and which he convinced himself was an unrepeatable masterpiece. The second is a collaboration with his hero Philip Glass on a musical adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s uncanny picture book In the Night Kitchen, cut short by Sendak’s death in 2012. 

Perhaps all artists live with these maddening ghosts: the performance you never saw and the work you never made. The might-have-beens and nearly-weres. But one of this show’s many motifs is kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken things with seams of gold so that they are more beautiful than ever. From the fragments of In the Night Kitchen, and McDermott’s own life, the two men eventually made a show that is the story of its own creation. It was inspired by a dream the director had while in a flotation tank; Glass is the kind of guy to say yes to this.

Tao of Glass is partly the autobiography of a fan who happens to be an exceptional storyteller, disguising structural ingenuity as amiable meandering. McDermott, 62, opens the show sitting in the front row, waxing lyrical about seeing the likes of Helen Mirren and Ben Kingsley as a teenager in Manchester. He re-enacts driving his family mad by blasting out Glass’s 1982 album Glassworks; traces his path from watching Glass operas to directing them himself through his theatre company Improbable; and explains how this show (previously staged in Manchester in 2019 and New York in 2023) came to pass. He mocks his astonishment at seeing his hero do normal-guy stuff (“Philip Glass eats sushi!”) but ultimately portrays the 89-year-old composer as a kind of humble mystic who doesn’t understand where his music comes from.

The score, performed by a quartet of violin, clarinet, piano and percussion, is characteristically meditative, with its loops and echoes and Escher-like reversals. At key points, a self-operating Steinway recreates Glass’s own playing, like a high-class player piano. The staging is just as intricately patterned, as three puppeteers conjure up magical set-pieces with humble materials (McDermott won an Olivier in 2023 for directing the RSC’s spectacular My Neighbour Totoro). In the Night Kitchen is resurrected in a few dream-like minutes of puppets and shadows against a kitchenware skyline, honouring Sendak’s vertiginous depiction of tumbling through different levels of reality. McDermott gabbles disconnected lines from all over, dressed as one of Beckett’s tramps, while the puppeteers swathe him in sticky tape and sheet-music tissue paper until he resembles the mad king of an empire of discarded things. Elsewhere, the paper coalesces into a bristling phantasm of Glass himself, communing with his piano.

Something further from Soho Place’s next production – two Hollywood stars in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – would be hard to imagine. Tao of Glass is a deeply personal, wholly original piece of work but it is not everybody’s idea of a good night out. Like the scene where he is swaddled in paper, McDermott keeps layering ideas, from ceramics and flotation tanks to the Rigveda and the Tao Te Ching, until he becomes hard to see. Three glowing concentric rings represent the therapist Arnold Mindell’s levels of existence, which McDermott previously explored in 1999’s Coma and which structure this show. These are Consensus Reality, Dreamland and Essence, the goal being to access them all through the total awareness of “deep democracy”.

Perhaps I’m lacking some vital spiritual nutrient, but I tend to think the meaning of life is best approached at a slant. McDermott’s tragicomic anecdote about a stupidly expensive glass coffee table that was shattered beyond the reach of kintsugi is a wonderful metaphor for the limits of second chances, but whenever the specific evanesces into the spiritual it’s transcendence or bust. As McDermott lies supine for 10 minutes, simulating a coma, while music rises from the Steinway, it’s either an emotional revelation or an invitation to check your watch. Of art, he says: “No one knows where it comes from but you have to keep doing it.” OK, sure. Is that an epiphany after two and a half hours? More moving to me is a very small, simple scene in which he sits down and plays Glassworks on a portable turntable in a devotional act of listening and remembering.

Ultimately, McDermott’s audacity and conviction prevail. One idea is that the coffee table’s glass was brittle and temporary whereas the Tao flows eternally – like a river, like art, like life. Glass’s music has been a river winding through McDermott’s life, and he dramatises what it means to plunge in and out of the current at different points, re-experiencing different versions of himself. I suppose Tao of Glass, with its ecstasies and frustrations, mirrors Glass’s polarising music. It asks you to surrender to a unique artistic vision and go with the flow.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.